Mérimée, PROSPER, a great French writer, was born at Paris, 28th September 1803, the son of a well-known painter. He was educated at the Collège Charlemagne, and tried law, but soon abandoned it. He was in Spain during the revolution of 1830, and after his return became attached to the government, and held office successively in the ministry of Marine, of Commerce, and of the Interior, becoming finally Inspector of Historical Documents, in which capacity he visited the south and west of France, Auvergne, and Corsica. He had been long an intimate friend of the Countess Montijo, mother of the Empress Eugénie, and consequently enjoyed the closest intimacy with the imperial family at the Tuileries, Compiègne, and Biarritz, yet without surrendering his independence of spirit and frankness of speech. Admitted to the Academy in 1844, he became a senator in 1853, and in 1858 president of the committee for reorganising the Bibliothèque Impériale. His last years were clouded by ill-health and melancholy, and the misfortunes of his country and the downfall of the imperial house hastened on his death, at Cannes, 23d September 1870.
Mérimée began his career as a writer at twenty-two by an audacious literary espéglerie, entitled Théâtre de Clara Gazul, a collection of Spanish plays of singular maturity, represented as translated by Joseph L'Estrange, with his own portrait in female dress as frontispiece. A volume of pretended translations of Illyrian folk-songs, by an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovitsh, followed in 1827, under the title Guzla. His more important works embrace novels and short stories, archaeological and historical dissertations, and travels, all of which display wide and exact learning, keen observation, strong intellectual grasp, grave irony and real humour, and withal a style that attains an exquisiteness of perfection rare even among the best French writers. Ever the refined and elegant scholar, he wrote, rather than affected to write, as a dilettante—'le gentleman auteur' as he was styled by his own countrymen. Of his more erudite works it may here be enough to name his Histoire de Don Pèdre I., Roi de Castille (1848; Eng. trans. 1849); Études sur l'Histoire Romaine (1844); Les faux Démétrius (1852); Monuments historiques (1843); and Mélanges historiques et littéraires (1855). But his greatest work is his tales, about twenty in number, some of which are among the rarest masterpieces of the story-teller's art: Colomba, Mateo Faleone, Carmen, La Venus d'Île, Lokis, Arsène Guillot, La Chambre Bleue, and L'Abbé Aubain. One of the most remarkable merits of some of these stories, as La Venus d'Île and Lokis, is the dexterous manner in which an uncanny superstition is turned to artistic use.
Mérimée's character remains somewhat of an enigma, with its outward mask of cynicism, its inward capacity for the most tender and devoted friendship, its longing for the love of little children. In his constant struggle against impulse and enthusiasm he succeeded, but, as he himself says of Saint-Clair in the Vase Étrusque, the victory cost him dear. Few lives have been more solitary and unhappy than Mérimée's, at once from a paralyzing distrust of himself and of others, and from the constitutional melancholy of the sceptic to whom the world is only a series of incomprehensible and fleeting images, and who mistrusts life and death alike. He was one of the few men who have drawn their unbelief from mother and father alike. No great writer has left a more remarkable monument than the famous Lettres à une Inconnue (1873; Eng. trans., edited by R. H. Stoddard in Scribner's 'Bric-a-Brac' series), the revelation of a heart throughout an acquaintance, first of love, then of friendship, extending over thirty years. Here we find no selfish cynic, but a man gracious, affectionate, delicate, touched with poetry despite his scepticism, faithful and loyal unto death—his last words were written but two hours before the end. The unknown lady's actual existence has been questioned, and she has been doubtfully identified with the Countess Lise Przedzierska, sister of the Marquis de Noailles. What professed to be her letters in reply were published in 1888, but without any explanation being offered; an English translation of these followed in two volumes in 1889. Only less interesting than the first series are the Lettres à une autre Inconnue (1875), and the Letters to Panizzi (edited by Louis Fagan, 2 vols. 1881), full of lively gossip and clever criticism.
See the Studies by Tamisier (Mars. 1875) and Haussonville (1888); also Tourneaux, Prosper Mérimée, ses Portraits, ses Dessins, &c. (1879).